Talk:Binaural fusion

College course project
Hi, my name is Kayleigh, and I am a student a Boston College. As part of a project for an Introduction to Neuroscience course, Natalie Mella, Armen Abagyan, and I are working on improving this article. Work on the article will take place over several months of fall 2012. For more information about the project please see here. Kmcglynn (talk) 13:49, 16 September 2012 (UTC)

We will be updating the article over the next few days. We will most likely be adding updates in pieces, and we would greatly appreciate it if no edits are made to the article while we are in the process of adding our updates. We will be finished this update by Monday, November 5, at the latest. Then there will be a peer review period, and a final update will be done at the end of the month. Kmcglynn (talk) 18:25, 3 November 2012 (UTC)

We removed the link to holonomic brain theory because, based on our research, we do not feel that this topic is relevant to binaural fusion. Additionally, the holonomic brain theory page does not refer to binaural fusion at all. Kmcglynn (talk) 20:50, 3 November 2012 (UTC)

Comments
I found that the overview of the article interesting and included interesting and relevant connections to the topic. It is written in a way that anybody could understand and allows for people who do not have a strong neuroscience background to still be able to get a good comprehension of it. In the rest of the sections, it starts to get a little confusing and hard to keep track of with all of the acronyms. Maybe you could insert an image of what you mean by left/right auditory pathways and where they converge or a visual representation of the dorsal nucleus and lateral lemniscus to make it easier for people to understand or follow. The section on autism is very interesting and clinically relevant. Tranpb (talk) 17:33, 17 November 2012 (UTC)

I find this article interesting and i think it is well written. i never knew that there was such a cognitive process that guides the sound to hear a particular speaker against other interfering voices. Although the picture on the page made it easier to conceive the anatomy of the signals of auditory pathway, it was difficult to know where the superior olivary complex, medial superior olive, and lateral superior olive--the major sites of binaural fusion. And for the functions part of inferior colliculus, what and how specific localizations of sound does it receive? I think the Functions part of the article and the Mechanisms part of the article are bit repetitive. Jaeha24 (talk) 18:46, 19 November 2012 (UTC)

I really liked reading this article and found it informative and well-written. In the introduction, if possible, it might be helpful to explain sound segregation (even just adding a few words about it as the source does to clarify). I don't know if it's necessary to include the Inferior colliculus section, it might be necessary to get more information on it or just mention at the end, without making a subsection specifically for it. I agree that the acronyms get confusing. I'm not sure if it would make more sense to write out the words the first few times or not, but because there are quite a few, it gets hard to remember them all. I thought the section on the implications in autism was interesting and enjoyed reading it. Nverghis (talk) 01:39, 18 November 2012 (UTC)

This article was clearly well-researched and I thought very informative overall. I agree with the comments stated above, that the acronyms get a little bit confusing as one reads further. Perhaps if you are not mentioning those particular phrases or names again, it may not even be worth making them acronyms. If they are linked to another wikipedia page which provides more information, I'm assuming their acronyms would be given there if it is commonly used. Furthermore, due to the detailed synthesis of information you attempt to make throughout the article, the result is a few run-on sentences. For example, in the introduction, perhaps breaking the paragraph that begins "In binaural integration..." into two sentence as opposed to one will make the statement clearer and more concise. Finally, some of the smaller sections I think should either be beefed up or combined, so as to give them some strength. Perhaps it should be reviewed if all of the subcategories of the main sections are necessary and crucial to an explanation of your topic. Great job in all though! Scollanm (talk) 11:17, 19 November 2012 (UTC)

Hey guys, I find your topic and page very interesting and thoroughly explored. Along with the acronym suggestion above, It may be helpful to pair each of the function topics with the mechanism that goes in hand with it. So instead of just having one headline for function and mechanism, maybe combine each function as its own section and the mechanism could be a sub section. This may make it easier to understand each individual process one at a time. For example, you could make LSO its own section, and underneath, you could add the mechanism as well as anatomical section if applicable. I think this organization would improve the reader's understanding of all the different aspects of the topic. Also, I like the section related to autism at the end. Are there any more clinical applications like this one? If so, it may be useful to add a clinical relevance section where you guys could mention other diseases relevant to binaural fusion. With theses additions along with polishing up a few sentences, I think this is a great article! Tyler.Popp (talk) 12:22, 19 November 2012 (UTC)

I really liked this article. From the get go, I knew what this article was talking about, so, very good introduction. Adding more hyperlinks to the mechanisms section would be appreciated. I know they are already linked in the anatomy section, but it would be nice not having to scroll to remember where the LSO is. I particularly enjoyed the section on autism, very informative. However, you failed to state that autism not only causes abnormalities in SOC, but also decreases the physical number of SOC neurons. Lastly, you didn’t say where is research is headed. One of the articles says that this research proves promising for autism diagnoses during the neonatal stage, which would be really great. Overall, great job guys. Tanbr (User talk:Tanbr) 23:43, 19 November 2012 (UTC)

Review
Great job so far, just a couple things you may want to watch out for. Sometimes headings that have only a small sentence underneath them should be expanded upon. This makes it look both visually pleasing and should warrant having its own heading. If there are many small subjects then you may just want to put them all together in their own paragraph. Remember to hyperlink them as well to other pages as well if you are going to take this approach. Good job otherwise. AdamMJenks (talk) 03:17, 29 November 2012 (UTC)

Response to peer reviews
To everyone who reviewed our article, thank you! We appreciate your feedback and found it to be very helpful in making our final edits of the article. First, we made some general grammatical changes to make the article easier to read, in particular we split some long sentences into multiple sentences. We also noticed that we weren’t being consistent throughout the article with the use of “binaural fusion” or “binaural integration”. We decided to change all of the “binaural integration” to “binaural fusion” to be more consistent with the article title

In the introduction, we added a sentence explaining sound segregation, as was suggested by one of the peer reviews. Since there is no Wikipedia page for sound segregation, we thought this short explanation would be especially helpful to the reader, and we thought this was a great suggestion.

A lot of you recommended not using acronyms because they were confusing; however, from our research and reading the scientific literature, we found that these abbreviations are actually very common, and it is much easier to read through an article or paper with the acronyms than if the entire phrases were spelled out. The Wikipedia manual of style recommends using acronyms and abbreviations in order to save space; therefore we decided to keep the acronyms. However, we did decide to write out “spherical bushy cells” and “globular bushy cells.” We found the acronyms SBCs and GBCs to be common in the scientific literature, but the Wikipedia page that discusses these topics does not use the acronyms, so we decided not to use them either. For all of the other acronyms, the Wikipedia page associated with these terms does use the acronyms. We want to be consistent with how these terms are referred to on other pages and throughout Wikipedia. We also updated the links to include the acronyms in the link instead of next to it in order to improve clarity and also because we noticed that other Wikipedia articles linked in this manner. In the function section, we decided to spell out medial superior olive and lateral superior olive in the subsection title, instead of using the acronyms, in order to eliminate some of the acronym usage.

In the Mechanism section, we decided to indent the subsections ITD and ILD, lateral superior olive, and medial superior olive under the superior olivary complex subsection because these mechanisms occur in the SOC, and we wanted to make this clearer.

We decided that we wanted to keep the function and mechanism sections separate. We found this division to be essential in making the topic of binaural fusion easier to understand. We found that when the scientific literature was confusing, it was often because explanations of the topic were very lengthy and included many layers of information; this was due to the fact that all of the information about the MSO, for instance, would be in one section, and then all of the information about the LSO, etc. When the function and mechanism were described at the same time like this it was more difficult to understand what the exact mechanism was. It is much easier for us to understand with the function and mechanism sections separate, and therefore, we believe that this division of information will also make it easier for all Wikipedia readers, who haven’t read the scientific literature, to understand the topic.

A few of you also suggested adding more images to the article. Unfortunately, we have spent hours on the Wikimedia commons website searching for images and haven’t had much luck. The image we have included on the page was the best we could find and was also the most relevant to our topic specifically. Many of the pages that we link to have images that are specific to those particular topics. We are not including more images, such as those from the pages we link to, because they are not relevant enough to binaural fusion specifically, and it would be redundant to use the same images that could be found by clicking on these links. To address the particular image requests more specifically, we could not find any images including the dorsal nucleus and lateral lemniscus both together; however, we would like to note that the lateral lemniscus is included in the image we have included, and there are also many images of this structure in particular on the lateral lemnicus Wikipedia page. We also could not locate any images that specifically showed the locations of the SOC, MSO, and LSO. However, in the anatomy section of the article, we do describe that the MSO and LSO are components of the SOC and that the SOC is located in the pons of the brainstem, and we link to the brainstem and pons pages. Additionally, the SOC is included in the image we have included in the article. We also could not locate any images showing the left and right auditory pathways and where they converge, but we believe that this phrase from the mechanism section of the article addresses the location sufficiently: “…the SOC, where afferent fibers of the left and right auditory pathways first converge.”

Because we did not have enough information on the inferior colliculus to keep it as its own subsection in the mechanism section, we added it into the section about the MSO. We also removed the IC information from the function section because the same information is repeated in the mechanism section. We also decided that the subsection on binaural summation at the end of the function section was too short, so we added this into the subsection about the central auditory system because it is a form of recognizing redundancy in sound cues, helping with the process that is binaural fusion.

In regards to the links, Wikipedia recommends only linking to a particular topic when it first appears in the article; however, because links in the mechanism section would be really helpful to the reader, and because this section is far away from where these topics are linked previously, we decided that it was appropriate to add more links to the mechanism section for the sake of ease of reading the article. We also added links in the image caption because we noticed that this is common on Wikipedia and is recommended.

We included some additional information about the dysmorphology of cells in autistic individuals and also included more links in this section as well. The information about diagnosing autism in the neonatal stage was interesting; however, we decided to not include this information because it is not relevant enough to binaural fusion specifically. It may be an appropriate addition to the autism page though.

Note to the general Wikipedia community: Our class project is now complete and we are done editing the article. Thank you for your patience during this extended period of editing.

Kmcglynn (talk) 23:37, 2 December 2012 (UTC)